“Ain’t No Sunshine” is one of the simplest but incredible classic soul ballads of all time. Bill Withers wrote this song for his 1971 debut album “Just as I Am”, and it was produced by Booker T. Jones.
Booker produced the song with the musicians Donald Dunn on bass guitar, Al Jackson Jr. on drums, and Stephen Stills on guitar.
The story of this beautiful song is quite interesting. Namely, Bill has publicly stated that he was inspired by the 1962 film “Days of Wine and Roses“. More specifically he was inspired by the characters played by Lee Remick and Jack Lemmon.
“They were both alcoholics who were alternately weak and strong. It’s like going back for seconds on rat poison. Sometimes you miss things that weren’t particularly good for you. It’s just something that crossed my mind from watching that movie, and probably something else that happened in my life that I’m not aware of,” he explained.
An interesting fact is that at the time, Withers worked in a factory of making toilets for Boeing 747 aircraft. At the time he was at the age of thirty-one. Also, his work environment and peers actually affected the third verse of the song. Namely, he asked them if he should leave the lyrics of the song as it was from the very beginning.
So, they told him not to change it at all. The verse where Withers’ repeats the phrase “I know” 26 times, became legendary thanks to his colleagues who told him not to change the lyrics of the song.
Over the years this song was many times covered by a lot of famous musicians. On the list are Joe Cocker, Tom Jones, Paul McCartney, Prince, Sting, Kenny Rogers, Stevie Wonder, Michael Jackson, etc.
Today, we have a special cover video of this song made by the Holland musician and guitarist Laszlo Buring. Namely, he is a 26-years-old musician who shares covers of the greatest rock songs. In the past blog posts, he shared his performances and showed us a new way of performing the songs.
This time he recorded a great cover of the song “Ain’t No Sunshine” but in the style of Dire Straits. He actually made this cover to show how this song would have sounded if it had been written and performed by the English rock band Dire Straits.
This cover is published on YouTube in July of 2021. Until now, the video has had a lot of positive comments and more than 28,000 views. Laszlo is already well known among our Dire Straits Blog readers, but if you want to read and hear more about him and his performances – CLICK HERE.
So far, Laszlo shared his covers for the songs “Layla”, “Sultans of Swing”, “I Shot the Sheriff”, and “Make You Feel My Love”. For today’s video, he shared some extra information with us.
“This one was a little more in the style of Dire Straits early records. No big synthesizers, effects, or Sting singing backing vocals. I took “Six Blade Knife” as a big inspiration for it, with a bit of an ominous sound and a steady beat,” he said.
“I transposed the song from A-minor to B-minor, to fit Knopfler’s vocal style a bit more, or me pretending to be Knopfler I should say. The song is quite mellow from beginning to end and has a lot of room for guitar solos and riffs in between sentences, which is one of the reasons I chose it. That way I was able to create some solos that sound similar to “Six Blade Knife” to finish the song off with.”
Laszlo has played this cover video on his Fender Vintera Stratocaster guitar from the 1950s. He also shared that with this guitar he can get even closer to that Mark Knopfler sound.
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